Department Research | Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy - The University of Texas Medical School at Houston

About The Multiphoton Confocal Microscope

7th Floor MSB
Coordinator: Leonard J. Cleary, Ph.D. | E-mail
Telephone: (713) 500-5631

LSM 510 Laser Scanning Microscope The department recently acquired a multiphoton confocal microscope, an instrument that represents the latest development in imaging technology. Traditional microscopes use regular light, which can cause tissue samples to appear blurry. Confocal microscopes eliminate much of the blurriness by clocking out light emitted from structures not in focus, producing a sharper image. Living tissue specimens, however, can be damaged by confocal microscopy. The multiphoton confocal microscope is superior to traditional and confocal microscopes in that it uses infrared light to illuminate only a small dot of tissue at a time. Moreover, in living tissue, damage is minimized. Because the light beam penetrates deeply, a greater volume of tissue can be examined.

Using The LSM 510 Laser Scanning Microscope

From The Desk of M. Neal Waxham, Professor, Department of Neuorbiology and Anatomy, UTMSH

Greetings,

This page will serve as an internal resource for the users of the NBA confocal facility.

I will start including useful reference material on this page and provide appropriate links that you might find useful.

The Office of Informatics is presently working on establishing a Windows based login system that is presently the only limitation in beginning to use the instrument. We hope this will be completed soon. I or Rong-yu Liu will likely need to be available for the first time each user signs in to help insure that the proper configurations are established for that user account. This should only be a one-time issue unless an account becomes corrupted.

We are establishing a web-based sign-up system that will be available to everyone in NBA. This will be the primary source for signing-up for the scope. Discussions are under way for appropriate limits on allocation. This is a work in progress and the policies will be instituted as needed, particularly if there are problems with access.

One document of immediate utility is the quick start manual provided by Zeiss for the use of the LSM 510.

The other document I’ve included is a primer on microscopy that any user would probably find useful. There are some excellent figures in this book that demonstrate some of the common mistakes made by novice (and experienced) microscopists.

At the moment, there are two people involved in the management of the facility:

Rong-yu Liu (telephone x5556, Rong-Yu.Liu@uth.tmc.edu) will be responsible for the day-to-day operation of the microscope, bimonthly instrument tune-ups and user training.

Neal Waxham (telephone x5621, M.N.Waxham@uth.tmc.edu) will be responsible for administrative and organizational issues and will serve as back-up should Rongyu be unavailable.

As issues come-up please do not hesitate to contact one or both of us.

Neal Waxham

Getting Started With The LSM 510 Laser Scanning Microscope

LSM 510 Quick Start Manual [ pdf ]
A Beginners' Guide To Practical Pitfalls in Image Acquisition
written by Alison J. North, Ph.D., Director of The Bioimaging Resource Center at
The Rockefeller University [ pdf ]
Confocal Facility Schedule Calendar Setup [ pdf ]
Requires Microsoft Outlook